Ahh, an ideolog, unconcerned with the real world.

So you're OK with someone shouting through a bullhorn at 3AM? That's a kind of speech right?

So your OK with lynch mobs, with some addressing an angry crowd shouting "are there any queers in the theater tonight? get them up against the wall! that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon, who let all this riffraff into the room? get em up against the wall!"

What about conspiracy to murder - that's speech?

I'm all for protecting the content of speech, and highly skeptical of any restrictions on political speech, but free speech isn't the only protected right, and often rights come into conflict. The right to speech is not the right to throw a brick wrapped in a note through a window. The right to speech is not the right to deliberately cause real and immediate physical harm to another. The right to speech is not the right to public nudity, though that's certainly a form of free expression.

And in this day and age, where it's trivial to order almost anything online, a local government restricting the local sale of X doesn't bother me - that's a world of difference from forbidding possession of X.

Repeated assertions are not argument. "Yes they are!" "No they aren't!"

There's a world of difference between content-based restrictions and time-place-manner based restrictions - do you agree? Are you okay with someone shouting their political speech through a bullhorn at your window at 3AM? Their non-political speech?

Do you believe "dry counties" are constitutional? Can a local government restrict the sale of anything the democratic process dislikes? No restrictions at all? Remember, what's "subjective" is subjective - I can find a study supporting any crazy idea.

Where specifically is your point of objection, or are you just emoting "I want everything I like gimme now"? Believing issues have simple black-and-white answers is something children do while they're learning about the world in all its complexity. The interesting discussion is "what's the right test for allowing the government to restrict this"? "Never ever" is a childish answer.

Or, put differently, a diversity of skills and abilities is what you want to deal with the unknown. NASA knows this, of course. But it's not just a variety of PhDs that you want, it's a variety of physical capacities and problem-solving approaches.

Historically, NASA has expected any improvisation to happen on the ground, where teams could experiment and relay the best, tested idea back to the guy in space. That becomes less practical the further you get form Earth. Diversity beyond "diversity of PhDs" will be valuable.

All law is subjective. The test for this stuff is well-hammered-out. To restrict something, the state must show both that there's a compelling state interest in doing so, and that the ban is the least-restrictive means of achieving that. Restricting commercial sale of something "harmful" is completely within the remit of government. That's different from outlawing the content itself, which is the core of the First Amendment. "Time, place, and manner" restrictions are legit.

This is much like the distinction between "hate speech," thankfully fully protected, and "incitement to riot" which might the very same content, but in a different time and place.

What people lose sight of is that these CP laws go farther than obscenity laws, so far that no other material has been allowed to be similarly restricted by the SCOTUS. And I very much fear that's just the camels nose under the tent when it comes to bypassing the First Amendment entirely.

Obscenity laws are much less restrictive than the witchhunt-inspired CP laws. Obscenity laws only ban the sale, and public display/performance of material. They don't ban possession, and IANAL but I don't know of any states where they ban the free, private distribution of material. Very different from the CP laws, which are overt prior restraint.

I don't find sensibly-written obscenity laws objectionable - that's just product regulation of a sort. If a local government wants to outlaw the sale of cartoons, or bomb-making instructions, or whatever, well, if they can demonstrate a strong interest of the state in doing so, and also that this is the least-restrictive means to achieve that objective, then go for it.

It's outlawing possession or non-commercial private distribution of "objectionable materials" that alarms me: it's only a matter of time before anti-party-in-power political speech joins the list of "objectionable material", if history is any guide.

Is there any current distro focused on easy desktop use that has resisted the system wave? I'd hate to see the world divided into "server distros (know what's you're doing or don't even try)" and "easy desktop distros, system required".

Further, this sounds like there's a lot of money to be made, and if your line went faster, you'd make a lot more money at the same price. Anyone capable of the logistics who wants some money? Sounds like you could make a pretty sum.

There's been a real shortage of RNs for over a decade now (there are various skill levels in nursing, but an RN is as much work as a non-specialist doctor, really). Supply and demand.

If you develop software for $40k, you should be looking. If you're willing to relocate and aren't fresh out of school, you'll certainly double, maybe triple that. All the big companies are hiring now. Make sure your resume is visible on LinkedIn (and maybe that Dice site, I guess) - I know my team is searching the nation for anyone qualified and willing to relocate, and we're not alone in that!

Brilliantly put - thanks! Software development is a world community, with people joining us from every nation in the world that has a credible CS program in any university. Far from being a race to the bottom, salaries remain high, and most devs these days live someplace where the money they spend in turn does wonders for the local economy (and local tax base).

Maybe it's just from high school in the 80s, but I'll always think of my community as "us geeks, who stand together against the jock menace".

Sure, sure, 300 years of technology have it all wrong and a few "recent studies" show one more way for hipsters to be "smarter" than everyone else. (There's no doubt serifs add redundancy, which helps when only fragments of letters remain, but that's difference from text being low-effort in small amounts in poor conditions, vs low effort in large amounts in good conditions.)

To mock your most absurd claim further (your last one): you can make sans-serif letterforms distinguishable, barely, with 5x3 pixels to work with. In the once-common 8x7 pixels fixed-width you can make sans-serif pretty clear and not too horrible - gods know I stared at that for enough years. Go ahead, try to make a serif font work for that! You'll end up with an extra hook here or there that helps a bit, which is to say you'll end up with the clever sans font MS uses in Visual Studio, with a serif on an i here and an l there but that's about it.

The one field that will never vanish (barring the coming of the Singularity) is software development. When your job is "automating stuff that hasn't yet been automated", you're not going to be automated out of a job. Specific technologies, frameworks, and languages fall by the wayside, but if you're not big on continuing self-study, this field is not for you.

Ah, here it is (PDF warning). It was linked from that blog post. Teach me to post before coffee!

nearlyfreespeech.net.

They actually fight back against takedown notices. They know they're a US site and give 0 fucks what foreign governments think of your content. They have a sense of humor (anyone have the link to their response letter about badgers?). Seems perfect for you.

Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).

Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.

Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.

Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).